The Shadow Of The Father-God: A Study Of Fatherhood In Two Plays Of Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller expresses a profound concern for fatherhood and father-son relationship in his early plays. In two of his major plays, All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, fatherhood is deified by both the fathers and the sons. This paper examines the father-god illusion in these plays and discloses its negative effect on the fathers and the sons within the theoretical framework of Jungian analytical psychology, to be supplemented by theories of gender psychology.This paper first examines the illusory nature of the fatherhood ideals of the fathers, and traces the root of the father-god illusion to the archetypal structure of male psyche. It then examines the causal relationship between the father-god illusion and the lives of the fathers from three aspects: hypermasculine stereotype, fatal predicament, and death, and explains why the fathers fail to escape from the illusion. It finally examines the negative effect of the illusion on the sons and their participation in sustaining the illusion, and explains how the sons' lives are controlled by it.The study shows that the father-god illusion causes hypermasculine stereotypes in the fathers and consequently contributes to their tragic fate. The sons' participation in sustaining the illusion contributes to the suicide of the fathers. As the father-god illusion is rooted in the archetypal structure of male psyche, neither the fathers nor the sons could discern the illusion and escape from its control.